What’s New with You?

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning. – Lamentations 3.22-23

The church office got a request this morning to participate in a survey.  The surveyors wanted to know if we had started a “new worship service” within the last two years.  I was tempted to reply that, indeed, we had; in fact, we had two new worship services just this past Sunday and that we have new worship services every Sunday.  I mean, since we didn’t do the same thing as we’d done the Sunday before, they had to be new services, right?

I knew what they were looking for, of course. (And I admit I was being mildly defensive.) They wanted to know if we had tried to start a “contemporary” worship service, or if we had attempted a Saturday, Friday, Thursday…evening service or if we were doing a service in Mandarin, or if we’d started a Cowboy church, or…. Well, you know.

These are tough days for the church, the argument goes.  We’re in a fight for our lives and we had better start thinking “outside the box” of old hymns, old choirs and old pipe organs.  The attendance in many of our mainline churches is dwindling.  We’ve got to do something new and do something now to bring in fresh members. So, we ask ourselves, “What do people want? How can we give it to them?”  People don’t want the old; they want the new. (Or so we’ve been told.)

As if what is new is always better than what is old.  As if giving people what they want is the operative principle in creating divine worship.  As if evangelism is nothing more than religious marketing. And maybe more to the point, as if people who don’t know God know what their souls really need.  (“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse,” Henry Ford once explained about his cars.)

Let it be known that I’m quite in agreement with those who think the church ought to be evangelical.  The original mission statement of every church is Matthew 28.19 and 20 and it’s still good:  “Go, make disciples; baptize and teach.”  If you think Jesus is worth listening to, you have to take that command seriously.

Still, I am not so sure that obsessively tailoring our worship services to the latest entertainment and life-style fashions (and so casually abandoning one’s own worship traditions) is what Jesus meant by going and making disciples.  It all seems so adolescent, so much like a junior-high level of insecurity, this wanting to be cool, hip and attractive – wanting to be anything beside than the geeky, awkward, fine-arts loving, potluck-competent, uniquely created and dearly-loved people that God seems to have made us to be.

It also seems beside the point.

It’s beside the point because evangelism isn’t supposed to be what we do inside the church building.  It’s what we do and how we talk at work, at school and at home. It’s how we drive our car and how we treat the waitress at the restaurant. Evangelism isn’t a program we do once a week.  It’s how we live all the time.  It’s letting our lives tell the story of how the grace of God is always new to us. If our ordinary run-of-the-mill lives don’t preach the gospel Monday through Saturday, it won’t ever matter what we do on Sunday morning, regardless of how a la mode we strive to be.

New worship services are not what the world needs to see out of us; it’s new lives, new vocabularies, new intentions, and new habits every morning.  And if the world likes what it sees in us, they’ll follow us wherever we go to church.

– KDS

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Waiting and Watching: The Two Activities of Advent

It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. – Lam. 3.26

If ever there was a season created to drive the typical  American crazy, it is Advent.  The American reputation for being driven, impatient, goal-obsessed, “let’s get it done” people is not without evidence. It’s been pointed out to us so often how much our lives revolve around instant breakfasts, ten-minute oil changes, self-help books, and microwave ovens, we hardly hear the words as a criticism.  “It’s who we are,”  we say to our critics and to ourselves.  We rarely imagine we could be any different.

If ever there was a season that Americans need more than Advent, I’m not sure what it would be.  We are a materially prosperous people – a prosperity due in no small part to our cultural task oriented-ness.  We are also a spiritually impoverished people. Far too often, if we think of God at all, it is only to include him as a partner in our own plans. And never one with a voting majority in the company.

Advent is the season of waiting and watching for God to act – two activities which are profoundly counter-cultural to our way of life.  Advent is not at all about hurrying up.  It is not about getting anything done. It’s not even about going anywhere.  It is so, as I said, un-American.

For four weeks before Christmas, we try to remember what it must have been like for Israel to nurture the hope of God’s salvation.  We try to wear the hat of a worn out, tired, hungry group of people who are at the end of all their ropes and know they need more than just a stronger army or a more vibrant economy or a new king on the throne.  We imagine what it must have been like to wait, not for a therapist or a professional coach or a consultant to help us manage our lives, but for a savior.  We try to wait, helpless as helpless can be, like they waited for God to come and do what he said he would do.  We try to imagine not our future with God in it but God’s future with us in it.

There is a lot of future-tense language in Advent.  In Isaiah we read words like these:  In the days to come, the house of the Lord will be established…. He shall judge between the nations….  They shall beat their swords into plowshares….  The wolf shall live with the lamb…. The eyes of the blind shall be opened…. And notice it’s all God’s future.  There are no plans of ours.

This is a vision of a very pleasant and comfortable future. It’s a world in which life is good for every person and every creature.  Advent language is all about a world where justice and health is second nature and God is on the throne of government.  It’s a place where the metals of industry are shaped into tools for life and not for death.  Above all, it is a universe of divine order and all living creatures know and are content in their unique place.

The hope of Advent was fulfilled in the Babe of Bethlehem, of course.  God did keep his promise.  Jesus is the reason why we ought to trust God for anything else he has promised, too.  He did it then and he will certainly come through for us again.

Advent probably makes sense only to people who know they need God more than anything else. It won’t work for those who want God sometimes, to help on some projects, or to be present in some places.  But for those who know they need a Savior, it’s a great time of the year.  The watching and waiting are, well, just what God’s people are supposed do.
– KDS

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